Wednesday, 31 October 2007

I started my "auto generated content" project 2007-10-01, and I ended it 2007-10-31.

The experimental phase is over. It's time to turn the experimenting into a full blown conveyor belt that delivers new sites that generates new web pages on autopilot. I chose The Blog Solution for my auto generated content sites, and it turns out that this has been a wise choice.

If you're interested in my splog business, you can follow the progress on the side bar on the right hand side of this blog. I will list all my splogs, with 1) URL, 2) indexed pages and 3) total pages.

It's time to move on to step 3: Scraping. I intend to scrape business directories and forums in the fine days to come in November. Stay tuned.

OptiRanker (http://www.optiranker.com/) is a web-based service which is either pure genius or total rubbish. I haven't decided yet.

OptiRanker claims to find all relevant (and in OptiRanker's own words - all neccessary) words and phrases to make a semantic complete text, based on the search phrase you are optimising your site for.

My personal SEO guru John Alexander recommends OptiRanker, so I have to take it seriously.

It isn't hard to make objections to this kind of software: Content is - in a way - not as important as it used to be. Simultaneously, search engines are growing up and their reading abilities are improving. Semantics are becoming more important.

So maybe this product isn't soooooo 2001 after all?

To cover the topic in a meaningful, semantic way is important. Words and phrases related to your key phrase (the phrase you are optimizing for) is obviously more important than we are aware of.

Using OptiRanker costs USD 7 for each and every search phrase. You get five search phrases for USD 20 and 15 search phrases for USD 50, so you get a little quantity discount.

I bought five search phrases for USD 20 to test this product.

OptiRanker consists of a lot of buttons and menus, but the priciple is dead easy:

1) The user keys in a search phrase into OptiRanker, chooses a search engine (Google, Yahoo or MSN) and hits enter.

2) After a few minutes, OptiRanker comes up with two lists; 1) which words and 2) which phrases that relates to the original search phrase.

3) The words and phrases are grouped and sorted in groups in a way that makes it easy to use them in Content Solution 2, and is presented in an Excel spreadsheet.

When you're about to write your super-optimised text for your super-optimised site, you pick at least one word from each group. OptiRanker gets all these words and phrases from the highest ranking web sites, so this is a kind of hi-tech, hi-cost scraping.

OptiRanker ignores national characters, so avoid OptiRanker if you're optimising for non-English phrases.

I have used OptiRanker in several SEO projects, and I find it interesting. Too early to draw any conclusions yet about if it is either money out of the window or a goldmine.

I have some pocket money for buying domains now and then, and some spare time to actually work at my Factory, in addition to my ordinary day job.

The heart of the Factory is a pretty simple conveyor belt, which allows me to mass produce web pages without reinventing the wheel, well -- without even thinking, as a matter of fact. I'm actually listening to an irritating contemporary soft adult radio station while setting up the sites.

This is my no-brain recipe for creating one new site every day (and that takes me about one hour a day):

Go to Google Catalogs or even a soon-to-be-extinct-Yellow Pages directory and pick a theme. Let's say you go for "Health & Personal Care". Pick a niche under this theme. Let's pick "Beauty". Pick a niche under this niche again, for instance "Shampoo".

Run these (few, but obvious) phrases through AdWords' keyword tool and write down every word in all the phrases, except beauty, personal, care and shampoo (these words are a part of the URL). You'll end up with maybe 150 words.

Register a domain that cover everything under paragraph 1 (i.e. personal-care-beauty-shampoo.com). Group the words from AdWords and make the groups into subdomains (i.e. hair-thickening.personal-care-beauty-shampoo.com). Make blogs under each subdomain, and keywords under each blog.

Register one domain name and create as many subdomains as you would like, but create no more than maximum 50 blogs under each subdomain and no more than five keywords per blog.

Key your main phrase ("personal care beauty shampoo") into Optirank. Write a 200-words text using the words you get from Optiranker.

Insert the text in the domain template in Blog Solution. This text is permanent and will never change. It will be located here: http://www.personal-care-beauty-shampoo.com.

Make a new non-sense text from the Optiranker keywords in Content Solution 2, consisting of sentences, stop words (the, and, of, in, etc) and little else but variables. This can look like this, for instance:

Create the blogs in Blog Solution and paste the RSS feeds from Content Solution 2 and Google Blogsearch into their respective blogs. Release one blog a day.

You're set. That took about one hour. Rinse and repeat once a day.

Why should you want to do this? This will get you around 1 million web pages in a two months time (before Christmas, if you start immediately). If you're lucky, 20% of these pages will be indexed by Google, meaning 200.000 pages will give linking power to 100 money sites by giving each money site 2.000 backlinks. Expect no or little traffic to your shampoo site - so don't be bothered by placing any AdSense ads. You are building linking power, not AdSense sites.

Friday, 19 October 2007

The first project is (unfortunately for my English speaking audience) in Norwegian, and was started on a whim: This week it became evident that tap water in Norway's capital Oslo has been infected with a parasite called giardia lamblia, aka just "giardia". Could I get some of that giardia action on the search engines if I acted quickly and the parasite persisted?

I registered the domain name giardia.no and set up 20 Blog Solution blogs on this domain. I use RSS feeds from the Norwegian search engine Sesam, more specific Sesam Blog Search and Sesam News Search. For an English blog, the equivalent would be to use Google Blog Search and Google News.

I think I made a major mistake by not using the domain name giardia.no for my money sites. After all, "giardia" is the most important of all the keywords.

One advantage of Blog Solution is that you are able to use multiple RSS feeds for each blog, multiple keywords for each blog and even multiple templates on random for each blog. So I distributed 45 keyords among my 20 Blog Solution blogs. Well, perhaps "Splogs" (spam blogs) is a more appropriate word than "blogs"?

I will use these 20 splogs mainly for linking to my money sites. The moment the 20 splogs are live, they're all hidden (or "in the batch", as Blog Solution calls it). One blog is released from the batch a day, just to make sure the growth looks a little bit organic and pseudo-natural. The active splogs are updated every hour (well, in 50% of the cases, just to make it look a bit more random/ less automated). And every hour 25% of the un-pinged posts are pinged.

So -- there you have my blogging & pinging machine.

And just for good measure, I put AdSense on every page, links to the index page of my money sites and deep links to my money sites (see next paragraph, please) on 25% of the pages of the splogs.

I will leave the project for now. And I will update this post with an AdSense income report and ranking reports for all three sites.

[Update 2007-10-21] The second project is still in development. It's quite ambitious. But nevertheless, I will try to describe it a little bit: I believe in not only to pick a niche, but to pick a niche within a niche. Or even better: Pick a niche within a niche within a niche. Take for instance beauty -> acne -> acne scars -> acne scar treatment. I've taken on business -> accounting, no less, and registered business-accounting.net as a start.

I've defined several niches within the accounting niche as sub-domains, like

books.business-accounting.net

career.business-accounting.net

classes.business-accounting.net

course.business-accounting.net

information.business-accounting.net

program.business-accounting.net

schools.business-accounting.net

seminars.business-accounting.net

software.business-accounting.net (this is actually divided into several sub-projects, like software-for-mac.business-accounting.net and software-packages.business-accounting.net)

system.business-accounting.net

Each sub-domain has about 50 blogs, according to Omar's recommendations. Take career.business-accounting.net, for instance. This sub-domain has 42 blogs, each with 2-5 keywords, like this:

There is no need for redundant keywords in the URL, so the phrase "financial accounting career" ends up as the URL "career.business-accounting.net/info/financial/", the phrase "accounting career salaries" ends up as the URL "career.business-accounting.net/info/salaries/", etc.

I pulled the keywords from a sad piece of software called AdSense Smarter, which I will review in a separate post. Further, I derived more keywords with AdWords' keyword tool. I don't know how to use Wordtracker yet, and I don't have enough experience to use Elite Keywords or Keyword Discovery. I guess I have to evaluate all these keyword tools later on.

My strategy is to carpet bomb the market with all kinds of variations of keywords within this niche. I used to set up websites with typically 25 pages, each page to target one keyphrase. One page used to take typically 30 minutes to set up, mainly due to the time consuming time it took to write a unique text for each page. Now I pull content through RSS feeds in addition to pull unique content from Content Solution. With custom made templates. I choose to use pretty competitive phrases instead of the mandatory "low hanging fruit", and see how this will lead me. I build linking power, not MFA sites.

I have absolutely now clue how this turns out. Time will show. It takes 6-8 months to see a web site's true potential, so I'll be much wiser by Easter 2008. But if each sub-directory (each containing about 50 blogs) are able to generate a couple of clicks each day (30 cents) in addition to the linking power, this project has been a success.

[update 2007-10-24] One little nasty detail came up today: For each and every installation of Blog Solution, you need a separate MYSQL database. No big deal, since I can set up as many databases I want with Dreamhost. It's quite possible that this little detail is in Omar's Blueprint (Blog Solution's substitute for a manual), but I didn't see it.

One more thing I'd like to comment on, is the almost uncanny response time for the Blog Solution's support desk. I usually get a reply a couple of hours after I send an e-mail, and always within the same day. This product is for real, and so is the support.

Sunday, 7 October 2007

Content Solution 2 is installed simply by uploading files to a new directory and then stepping through a very simple setup routine.

If you have several authors, it can be a good idea to install Content Solution on different domains -- one domain for each author.

Don't run Content Solution with FireFox. I had to resort to Microsoft Internet Explorer to make it run as it should. No problem - as long as you're aware of it.

The Content Solution is OK (not good, but OK) for storing content. I prefer my own CMS with my own MYSQL database for storing content, but if you get used to it, Content Solution will do.

Use Content Solution for fetching text from the internet and then rewriting it by substituting regular words with variables. The sentence "Welcome to Oslo" can easily be altered to "Welcome to [city]", and if the variable [city] has five different values -- voila; you've got five different texts instead of one. Change two words into two different variables, and assign five different values to each variable; and you suddenly have 25 different texts! Shuffle sentences in the text -- and you have texts that are unique enough to pass the Google Duplicate Content Radar.

Content Solution outputs RSS, which can be imported into Blog Solution for further use. This is done on a once-for-all-basis, and everything happens automatically if you've set up everything correctly:

For instance: You create a text in Content Solution that outputs 1024 versions of that text through a RSS feed, with scrambled sentences an' all. Create nine more of those texts within the same theme, and you've got more than 10.000 texts, ready to be publicized. Now Blog Solution comes in handy: Blog Solution publicizes one post every day, just to make sure it doesn't look strange when 10.000 new posts suddenly appear out of the blue.

Content Solution is a bit harder to use than Blog Solution, but the instruction videos are pretty neat and extremely helpful.

First and foremost: You can search and scrape from Google within Content Solution, but you're getting the American English Google results. You cannot localize the various search engines, which make this function somewhat limited. The solution is to search Google outside Content Solution and simply copying the text to Content Solution before you start editing it. But I can live with that.

The editor doesn't support national characters like æ, ø, å, ñ, etc which is the most serious error in Content Solution's editor. Unfortunately, this error makes Content Solution virtually useless for non-English languages.

[update 2007-10-09] One workaround for national characters is to enter the unicode instead of the character itself in Content Solution's editor. This works for me! The same goes for the variables, but there is no need to use national characters in the variable's name.

I've installed Blog Solution, and all in all I'm pretty happy with it. Here are my impressions so far:

Unlike most software in the get-rich-quick genre, Blog Solution actually delivers. Of course, they use the same daft sales pitches you've seen everywhere else ("OMG - I earned $40.000 in my first week", "All my sites have PR6 - I'm in shock", "The Future of Software", etc) but the software is solid built, fairly easy to use and comes with an active forum and video tutorials.

Omar, one of the authors of Blog Solution, has compiled a blueprint which contains a lot of useful hints on how to use the Blog Solution software to avoid penalties of various kinds. The blueprint has a down-to-earth, honest, biased (of course) and affiliate-link-free way of guiding you through the art of setting up splogs.

Blog Solution is a bit picky when it comes to your server's configuration. You need to install the scripts on your server. You need at least one domain and a hosting account that support:

Linux (no support for Windows boxes)

PHP

MySQL

Zend Optimizer

Be sure that you are able to configure cron jobs without any hassle on your server! I used my Dreamhost server for this purpose, and I was able to configure and install everything, including the cron job, in one go.

BlogSolution makes simple web sites that doesn't look too good. You can use customised templates, so I guess your autogenerated blogs can look pretty well, it just depends on how much design work you put into it.

The content is pretty simple and pretty poor. Well, this depends of course on the RSS feed(s) you are using, but if you use all the default settings, you end up with a pretty crappy looking blog.

When you install BlogSolution, you have to install it on a brand new domain. I created blog.norgesinfo.com (this is regarded as a new domain. www.norgesinfo.com/blog isn't). Then you install the files (one minute binary upload), enter your keywords, generate your blogs (18 keywords generate 18 blogs -- one blog for each keyword), set up your three cron jobs (one for blog creation (in case you will roll out one and one blog at a time instead of hundreds of blogs at the same time), one for post creation and one for pinging) and finally forget all about the blog.

My main site www.norgesinfo.com is about traveling, so I decided to give my blog the same theme. I entered the following keywords:

Cons: Crappy layout (can be improved by better design), limited amount of text in each post (due to the RSS feeds. Can this be improved? I think a product called RSS Magician can help me here), poor quality of the various posts (is there a way to quality control these posts before they are posted? I think ContentSolution can help me rewrite articles manually.).

Tuesday, 2 October 2007

This is a step I haven't been looking forward to. I hate sites like these, I hate to waste time producing rubbish and these sites are to absolutely no value to anybody. Perhaps with the exception of the owner of the AdSense code embedded into the sites.

But this will be an experience anyway, so here goes.

I've decided to use BlogSolution as a CMS for these auto generated sites. This web based software takes care of automatic generation of content of as may blogs you could possibly want, after you've set it all up.

In an ideal world, I would prefer to program this myself. Maybe in lap #2? Formerly I've used Carp to deliver RSS feeds to my semi-automatic sites (or at least to certain parts of the site, just to make it look fresh) along with MySQL and PHP, but this time I'll give BlogSolution a go.

BlogSolution does everything for you. One other advantage to BlogSolution is that there is a whole line of BlogSolution compatible products available. Check these URLs out:

Well, I included this point just because it has given me some traffic in the past. It is a sooo 1999, lo-life way of getting traffic, but if you get the right domain name, it really pays off.

I will not mention the specific domains I've already registered (besides, they're of no interest to you, because they're already taken). I will just give you some general ideas of what to look for:

Look for volume sites with domain names with double consonants. Internet users in general cannot spell, and often omit one of the two consonants (if there are double consonants present in the word).

I.E: If "blogger.com" is a popular site, register "bloger.com".

Even better: If the domain consists of two words where the last character in the first word is similar to the first character in the second word, you have a winner.

I.E: "carregister.com" is often mis-typed as "caregister.com". In this case, you register both "caregister.com" and "car-register.com" (see next paragraph).

Internet users use hyphens much more than the companies that name the sites. Especially is this true if the site consists of both letters and numbers.

I.E: If "seat24.com" is a popular site, register "seat-24.com".

Naturally, this also goes for all domain names consisting of two or more words.

I.E: If "facebook.com" is a popular site, register "face-book.com".

Use your imagination, take a chance. Domains are cheap, the downside is limited to a few dollars and normally you just need that one sale a year to profit from it. So go wild. You will be surprised to see which words people actually type into the URL field in their browsers.

Assignment: Log into the affiliate system you use (Trade Doubler, Commission Junction, Clickbank, Advertising.com or whatever you use) and see if you can find domain names that matches the criterias I've mentioned above. Then register a leech domain and redirect all the traffic from your domain to the advertiser through your affiliate link.

The pages in the sites described in paragraph 2 and 3 will probably be moved to Google's supplementary index immediately after indexing, and should be kept on a separate server to prevent them from jinxing the entire project.

Huge sites: I need several huge sites for building links to my optimised sites. A huge site consists of a huge number of dynamic pages with fairly original content, for instance 500.000 web pages. Normally, around 20% of all pages are indexed on Google. This means that 100.000 pages are indexed on an average site this size.

Recycled sites: Expired domains with recycled content from either Google cache or Archive.org.

Warehouse sites: Collection of affiliate URLs.

Optimised pages: AKA "Mini sites". Pick a niche, build optimised pages, build links and get good SERP rankings. One optimised site consists of from 20 to 100 optimised pages. Google seem to have a thing for sites with 100+ pages, so I'll try to make them bigger than 100 pages. 100.000 link pages from the huge sites (se the previous paragraph) distributed among 20 optimised sites with 100 pages each gives each page 50 links each. Carefully built, this is normally enough offpage SEO to get good SERP rankings.

Landing pages: Pages made with good conversion rates in mind, but with no SEO implemented whatsoever. Optimised pages (previous paragraph) or AdWords will send traffic to these pages.

Blogs (like this one): High-quality, custom made blogs with quality content. Crappy conversion, no SEO, but these are the sites to show prospective sponsors and partners when applying for their affiliate programmes.